Wednesday, May 27, 2009

In the open source community we forget sometimes that non-techie individuals or Windows tech people don't understand what we are talking about. An example is just in this title GNU which is a recursive acronym for GNU's not Unix. Living in the FLOSS(Free Libre Open Source Software) community, we are generally limited to a small social group which really isn't that small since their are millions of users around the world. I decided to write about this in my blog due to a conversation I had with two individuals. I was at a cafeteria when I was approached with comments reference my EEEPC. Since I'm a Linux advocate I assured to let them know that is was running Linux. I just assumed that people would know the word Linux, but now that I look back in time even I didn't know what it was before I ran it. They saw my wallpaper that had an Ubuntu logo on it with the words Ubuntu and they pointed to it and said I know what that is. You see in my community it all makes sense because I know my community but to others it is just odd. Their are just to many names for Linux. People are use to one name systems like Windows or Mac. Do we call the system by what the Free Software Foundation calls it GNU/Linux or just Linux. To get to the bottom of it the name Linux really means the heart of the system the kernel, in return we use that as the name. Linux has many distributions Ubuntu,Fedora,OpenSuse,Debian,Slackware just to name a few. Now with Ubuntu standing out in the public eye it is used to define Linux which really isn't fair to the rest of the distributions. I know that people will not comprehend entirely which is ok but we need not to scare some people off by name confusion. Maybe by using the word Linux after the distributions name will help like Ubuntu Linux, Fedora Linux. Well, anyway that is my thoughts for this post.